THE GLAMOROUS GAZE
PORTRAITS BY MARK A. VIEIRA, 1973 to 1983

A Photographic Exhibition Presented by

ONE Archives Gallery and Museum
626 North Robertson Boulevard
West Hollywood CA 90069

October 2 through December 26, 2010

The period following Gay Liberation and preceding AIDS was much like the Roaring Twenties, a time of experimentation, inanity, and self-expression.

Mark A. Vieira was a staff photographer at the University of Southern California and a student of Hollywood glamour photographer George Hurrell. Vieira used this technique—view camera, incandescent lights, and pencil retouching—to glamorize subjects he found at Studio One and Circus. This look at the gay disco era has a unique perspective, that of an artist capturing his peers with a lost idiom.

Who was that bearded young man gazing from the sultry shadows of Circus Disco in ’79? Was it Caravaggio? Toulouse-Lautrec? Brassai? No. It was a dental school photographer named Mark A. Vieira. As much a participant as an observer in the gay disco scene of the Seventies, Mark saw gay history played out in the glittering nightspots of Los Angeles and San Francisco. He also recorded it, creating a remarkable album of its colorful personalities. From that album comes a photographic exhibition, The Glamorous Gaze, Photographs by Mark A. Vieira, 1973-83.

The images in The Glamorous Gaze come from a significant period in gay history, the years following Gay Liberation and preceding AIDS. Mark A. Vieira was a staff photographer at the University of Southern California’s School of Dentistry from 1973 through 1979, and a commercial photographer in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s. He found subjects at Studio One, Circus, and the Stud, young gay people tasting their first freedom, creating new identities and a new world.

Most artists record the culture of their era with the technology of that era; not Vieira. From the time he got his first photography job (in October 1969 at California State College Hayward), he insisted on emulating the artists of Hollywood’s Golden Era. Everyone else was using 35mm cameras to “tell it like it is.” Vieira used a view camera, incandescent lights, and pencil retouching. He wanted to show people as he saw them—glamorous.

He photographed gay men and women (and their straight friends), choosing subjects of diverse culture and ethnicity, some of whom came from social strata not usually accorded respect. He was able to make figure studies because of the recent Supreme Court ruling that nudity was not obscene. In every case, he sought to idealize his subjects, whether with soft light, soft focus, or delicately rendered retouching. The Glamorous Gaze, his view of the gay world from 1973 to 1983, has a unique perspective, that of an artist artist viewing his contemporaries through a magic lens.

THE GLAMOROUS GAZE

October 2 through December 26, 2010

ONE Archives Gallery and Museum
626 N. Robertson Blvd. West Hollywood CA 90069
Gallery Entrance on El Tovar Place

Fridays from 4:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
Saturdays from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Sundays from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Presented by ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives
www.onearchives.org/